Jeff Vrabel: Good luck keeping your eyes open for this

Hey, here's a crazy thing: Apparently it turns out that you need sleep.

Jeff Vrabel

Hey, here's a crazy thing: Apparently it turns out that you need sleep.

By "you," I mean "anyone who is cognizant enough to be reading these magnificent words right now," and by "sleep," I mean "the thing you do at night while the TV is on, if you're in an office meeting starring productivity charts, or, sometimes, if you're me, on your morning commute," which is not nearly as bad as it sounds because really, my commute is pretty much a straight line, and if things get really hairy my helper monkey can usually jump in and do a little light steering while slapping me back into a serviceable alertness.

I am just kidding, of course -- my helper monkey is only certified for commercial work, and besides, I would never drive a car while sleeping, mostly because that would sap valuable time away from the other activities I need to be involved with in the car, such as texting, futzing with the iPod every eight seconds and attempting to reassemble my son's Thomas The Tank Engine magnet storybook, which comes with 12 million separate magnets, most of which are six or seven molecules in size, and which I've brought into the car for a delightful litany of reasons that pretty much begins and ends with, "I'm breathtakingly stupid."

Still, all of these activities, while wildly unsafe, are at the very least things you can do with your eyes open, whereas apparently when you're on the road, something like every third car you're passing is staffed by someone who is desperately struggling to stay awake, if not having some sort of waking dream regarding, say, Keira Knightley, several cocktails and a Notre Dame cheerleaders outfit, and now I've already said too much, and all of you get out of my waking dream.

It is with joy and no small degree of gloating that I can report that such things aren't really a problem for me. I have been blessed with the innate ability -- well, a gift really -- to fall asleep instantly in almost any situation, be it on the couch in front of Letterman, in the middle of a movie (particularly those based on anything that might have ever occurred to Jane Austen) or in mid-conversation, which makes me extremely popular at parties. So sleep deprivation is not really a problem for me, especially not if a bottle of easily obtained red wine is somewhere in the building.

But what's most surprising about all this is the results of a number of studies currently going on in low-lit, highly soothing laboratories around the country, research that more or less indicates the following: If you do not get a lot of sleep, you will be tired the next day, and probably not someone the rest of us want operating a backhoe. "You need sleep for your brain more than anything, because your brain uses more than 20 percent of the fuel your body burns in a day," Dr. Denise Amschler, a Ball State professor, said in a 2005 story, intimating that my brain pretty much enjoys a cup of coffee each morning by itself (ah, don't act like you don't like it, Brain).

If you have made it down this far, first of all, congratulations on staying awake; I'm barely conscious enough to remain typing, frankly, and am half-considering turning things over to the helper monkey at this point. But if this is the case, you are also in the minority. According to a 2002 Sleep In American poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (their football program, incidentally, really, really sucks), only 30 percent of us Americans sleep eight or more hours a night, enough to fall within the recommended adult dosage of seven to nine hours. We have to make statistical allowances here for people who do not need as much as sleep as others, as well as for people whose work shifts have to fall in the evenings, such as newspaper editors, police officers and Batman. But according to a separate Gallup poll, drowsiness is a problem for 56 percent of adults, although those numbers are skewed too, because polling is really boring and is frankly causing me to get a little drowsy just thinking about it.

Think about what this means, and go grab yourself a Mountain Dew if it'll help. OK, that's better. Studies have shown that the effects of sleep deprivation include, but are not limited to, fatigue, lack of concentration, decreased motivation, impaired memory, poor moods, wall runnings-into, illness, insomnia, public snorage, decreased performance, diabetes, instinctively snuggling with the person next to you on the bus, immune system dysfunction, safety hazards, slower reaction times, weight gain, stress and aggressiveness. I think we can also agree that if there's anything we don't need around here, it's more aggressive sleep-deprived concentration-less fat people in front of us at the doctor's office. But the upshot of all this study, all this research, all this fact-recording, is that if it's late, you should probably be asleep, and if you're not you are more likely than not posing a subtle danger to me and my monkey.

Jeff Vrabel is a freelance writer who is probably digging around under the carseats for the Percy magnet as you read this. He can be reached at www.jeffvrabel.com.

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